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New Script Calls for More U.S. Quantitative Easing: Opinion

The following commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet's guest contributor program, which is separate from the company's news coverage.

NEW YORK ( Bullion Bulls Canada ) -- Ben Bernanke has been in a quandary, ever since the Federal Reserve's QE II was universally castigated as a reckless (and selfish) escapade by the U.S., aimed at doing nothing more than propping up the value of the "financial assets" of the Wall Street crime syndicate.&nbsp; Bernanke never understood that criticism, since all of the money-printing done by the Federal Reserve is for the specific intent of propping up the value of Wall Street's financial assets. How else do you stop Ponzi schemes from imploding?

Be that as it may, the one thing which Bernanke did understand is that there was little tolerance (and certainly no appetite) in the global community for more U.S. quantitative easing. To understand this requires actually taking a moment to define quantitative easing, since though the mainstream media uses the term a million times a month, they never explain it.

Quantitative easing &nbsp; is nothing but a 21 st century euphemism to replace a 20 th century euphemism: "monetizing debt." Those with any understanding of language realize that euphemisms are expressions we create when we want to (more or less) lie about a subject -- because telling the plain truth is too unpalatable.

In this case, quantitative easing (aka "monetizing debt") is nothing more than printing money out of thin air to (pretend to) pay one's bills. This brings us to the multi-trillion dollar Ponzi-scheme known as the Western financial system. To illustrate how far Western finances have deteriorated requires&nbsp; providing some historical context.

Following Canada's previous, disastrous experiment with the Conservative Party (during the last half of the 1980's, and early 1990's), the reckless fiscal incompetence of the Mulroney regime had saddled Canada with one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the entire Western world. Peaking at 70%, Canada's indebtedness was regarded internationally as nothing less than an economic crisis. The Liberal government which inherited Mulroney's mess, engineered a remarkable fiscal turn-around -- going from record deficits to a budget surplus in little more than two years -- and produced a decade of surpluses after that.

Today, with a new Conservative Prime Minister at the helm, all those years of surplus have been squandered and once again Canada's debt-level has hit a new record high of 83% of GDP , while once again Canada is saddled with record deficits. Yet instead of being labeled as a poster-child for fiscal irresponsibility as it was in the 1990's, today it is hailed as a paragon of fiscal prudence -- because most of the rest of the West is even more obviously (i.e. hopelessly) insolvent .